Mumbai Suspect's Wife Warned FBI About Him

She alerted them 3 years before attack

(Newser)
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The wife of the American businessman accused of helping plot the 2008 Mumbai attacks told the FBI three years earlier that he was training to be a terrorist, reports Pro Publica. After a domestic abuse incident, the wife of David Coleman Headley tipped off the agency that her husband was working with the terror group Lashkar-i-Taiba in Pakistan and shopping around for night-vision goggles and other equipment. The tip apparently went nowhere, and Headley spent the next years visiting Mumbai (five times) with the aid of his US passport and scouting locations for the attack, say authorities.

The case is made murkier by the fact that Headley—born in the US but raised in Pakistan—worked for years as a paid informant to the DEA, though exactly when that relationship ended is unclear. All of which raises questions about intelligence agencies' vow to get better at coordinating information, says ProPublica. Counters one US anti-terror official: "They get half-a-dozen leads a day like this. People ratting out family members, people with grudges. Something like this does not ramp up to the White House."

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